


Remake

by scioscribe



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Background Jack/Ianto and Owen/Tosh, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Polyamory, Pre-Poly, Undead Owen Harper, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:48:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25025683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: The bitter taste in Owen's mouth was an illusion, bile-like nothingness. Everything was even more ruined than it had been before. He’d already been scorched earth, and now he was salted, too. “He gave me wings.”He said it mockingly, because how else could he say it?
Relationships: Owen Harper & Torchwood Team, Owen Harper/Ianto Jones
Comments: 13
Kudos: 49
Collections: Wingfic Exchange June 2020





	Remake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



There was no anesthesia, naturally, and no painkillers either.

No circulatory system, no respiratory system: no point.

But they couldn’t have him moving, so they strapped him into place. It was amazing, Owen thought, the shit that could start to feel homey to you—shiny surgical steel autopsy table kitted out with enough leather straps to liven up even Jack’s wildest fantasies? Might as well be another day at the office. If he’d walked in one morning—one _late_ morning—and found his own table desecrated with fancy bondage gear, he wouldn’t have batted an eye. Back when he was alive, he’d have just been peeved that something fun had started off without him.

But he wasn’t alive, and he wasn’t at home, and it was safe to say that he was peeved about any number of things at the moment.

Funny thing, being scared without having the proper chemicals. His heart not racing, not moving, even as they secured him to the table, face-down.

There was a little foam guard there, a kind of stand for his forehead and chin, so he didn’t have to lie with his face mashed flat against the metal. Considerate.

And the other funny thing was being scared of what didn’t matter anymore. What was the worst they could do, kill him? Yesterday’s news, mate. Hurt him? Good luck with it. The synapses were all snuffed out. Pain was a joke now.

But dammit, he _was_ scared, even if his adrenaline had forsaken him. Even if he was being a coward.

He tried to talk around the rag they’d shoved in his mouth. Scotch tape holding it in place. Professional doctors and fucking amateur kidnappers. He got a bit of it loose and spat out the rag.

“You fuckers.” He was almost panting. (Interesting. Residual, psychological, and pointless, but interesting.) “You have no _idea_ what kind of hell’s going to rain down on you for this.”

They just ignored him, and on the whole, Owen thought he’d rather have the gag back in. Not being listened to made him feel like even more of a ghost than he already was.

Then one of them, a bloke with a plummy accent, said, “We’ll show you the footage of the operation, once you’re in recovery. You’ll see how fascinating it is.”

“You’re going to videotape yourselves committing assault,” Owen said. “That’s brilliant, that.”

“As crimes go, it’s only on par with desecrating a grave. There’s a long history of doctors practicing on corpses. You’re just the twenty-first century equivalent.”

They still sterilized his skin after they cut off his shirt. God, could he still get _infections_? Could bacteria just set up shop in a body that couldn’t fight them off?

They didn’t mess around, this lot. Even the first cut was long and deep and sure, slicing through the meat of his back and shoulder.

“There’s a texture difference,” a Welsh woman said. “Between his body and living tissue. More like cutting through raw steak.”

“Is it?” Plummy said. “I wouldn’t know. Vegetarian, you know.”

“Of course,” Owen said through gritted teeth. He couldn’t stand the sound of the scalpel against his shoulder-blade, nicking along the bone like it was going to scrimshaw him from the inside-out. “Wouldn’t want to be _cruel_ , would we.”

It didn’t matter. They’d gone back to ignoring him.

When they peeled back some of the layers of muscle, there was a sickening, wet sound. He asked what they were doing, what the hell they thought they were playing at, but he didn’t get an answer. Just the more minute pickings of some instrument at his exposed flesh and bones.

They were adding something to him, something a bit meshy. It was stingingly cold, cuttingly cold, like needles made out of frost—he’d had some residual body heat sealed up inside his skin, some warmth close to his bones that was flooding out of him now, out the vents they’d cut into him.

It hurt about as bad as anything he had ever felt, but it was a _feeling_ , and he clung to it until it passed, until his temperature hit a new equilibrium and everything went back to the same lukewarm wash of nothingness.

Then it was all just a question of pressure, really. Pressure and fear and boredom, because they were taking all bloody day with it. He’d never thought how boring surgery would have to be if you were an unanesthetized patient. He’d never _had_ to think about it, not being a fucking psychopath.

They did the other side of him too, carving him up and then braiding in something artificial. He’d given up asking what.

Too gruesome to think about how he’d probably have to deal with all this once his team found him. He was tired, frankly, exhausted all the way down to his bones, to the skeleton a dead man ought to be busy becoming, in the natural order of things. These arseholes didn’t understand that he didn’t _heal_ , that cleaning up after them was going to mean a constant daily slog of superglue and staples, and even then he’d still have some seeping, sludge-like blood pressed out of him, thicker and darker in death than it was in life.

And why wasn’t anyone _coming_? He’d been snatched bloody hours ago; there was no way Tosh hadn’t ripped CCTV footage of half the country by now—

“The device now,” Plummy said.

Owen had worked his way into a kind of strung-out state, awake but still dreaming, but his attention came back for that like a shot. Nothing that got called “the device” could possibly be any good.

“What’s it do?”

“I think it’s the third ring there, that’s the one you want—it seems to be a dial, even if it’s not notched—”

“Oi, you lot, Burke and Hare. I’m _talking_ to you.” He didn’t like how nervy he sounded, how close to desperate. Whatever they were using sounded alien, and if there was anything that was going to fuck up his life more than it was fucked already, it’d be untested alien tech in the hands of unsanctioned morons.

“Maybe you should hold his head,” the Welsh woman suggested to one of the burly nurses they’d got in, the ones who had done such a bang-up job strapping him down.

Meaty hands planted themselves on either side of Owen’s head.

“Here goes nothing,” Plummy said cheerfully.

There was a grinding noise, like a dentist’s drill, and the smell of burning plastic. Everywhere they’d touched him felt about like what it felt to chew on tinfoil, like he’d just been turned into some kind of battery. And violet light, somehow gummy violet light, sticky against his eyelids.

And then, for a long time, there was nothing. Nothing at all.

* * *

They stood by that promise to let him watch the recording of his surgery. A courtesy, he reckoned, one colleague to another—he was a corpse when they wanted to do God only knew what to him and another doctor when they wanted to brag about it. Wankers. His hands were shaking—muscle control, or the lack of it, was one of the few things his bloody undeath didn’t seem to have tossed out the window, and it rankled him that he had to be grateful for it. _Grateful_ , when this was shit he’d trained himself out of years ago, supposedly. Couldn’t do surgery with shaky hands, could you?

But you could watch it with them.

So there he was, watching. Wrapped up like Boris bloody Karloff. Stuck in the back of a rollicking lorry, getting jostled around as the sorry excuse for a driver seemed to be going out of the way to hit every pothole he could find. The laptop screen jigged along with him, rattling against the knees of good old Plummy, who held it for him, who watched him watching.

 _Fuck_ , Owen didn’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction of a real reaction. But he couldn’t help it. He might have been dead, but he wasn’t made out of stone.

And what he was seeing, what they’d done to him—

He didn’t know what he’d thought it was—the weight on his shoulders, bowing them back, the twitchiness of new nerve endings all delicate and springy like fresh grass—but not _this_.

On the bouncing screen, in that little rectangle of fuzzy light, they filleted him. The colors inside him were all off—well, not off for an autopsy, really, but off for a living body. Like they’d said, he was meat now.

They filleted him and spread him, splitting open two stretched-out ovals, making holes in him that looked like Georgia O’Keeffe crossed with Salvador Dalí.

And then, into the slots they’d made, they inserted their tabs, neat as fucking IKEA.

They’d given him wings.

He didn’t know what the hell the material was, but they took it out of an ice-chest like it was a donor heart or something. Organic, then, at least mostly. Stripped off some poor devil of an alien who’d had the misfortune to wash up in the exact wrong place.

It was flimsy stuff. Must be, since they kept warning each other not to tear it. He remembered that bit.

Plummy was talking to him in the here-and-now, yammering on about the future of prosthetics and alternate circulatory systems and how Owen’s body literally couldn’t reject a graft or a transplant, how this was only the first step.

The wings were a tallowy color, like stretched-out wax, but he could only really tell that when they got bunched up a bit. Otherwise they were so thin they were almost translucent. Their frame, black bones or cartilage or metal, for all he knew, must have been behind the weight he was feeling.

His doctors, his _mutilators_ , had done some of the attaching themselves, knitting the wings into his still-twitching muscles, but it was their device—yep, alien tech, bumpy and greasy-gray as ever—that finished the work. It looked like it was electrocuting him. Owen watched, half-nauseated with horror and curiosity, as his body spasmed on the table. Oh, he’d snapped one of the straps in two then: hurray for him.

He could feel the sticky heaviness of the wings against his back now. He wanted to tear them off, rip them like the wet paper stuff they were.

God, wasn’t it enough that he was practically a zombie? King of the bloody Weevils? Did he have to be a freak in the bargain, so alien-monstrous that he couldn’t even walk down the fucking street?

“I don’t even look human anymore,” Owen said. His voice was hoarse.

He must have cut through whatever Plummy had been saying, because Plummy closed the laptop in a huff. “You’re focusing on the wrong things.”

“Am I,” Owen said flatly.

“The surgeries with you—this was only the start—will do more to advance our understanding of transplants and xenobiology than anything—”

The lorry thudded to a halt, jerking Owen against his bindings. Sorry case of sideways whiplash.

Plummy said, “What on earth?” and stood up.

Owen knew what it was, even though he couldn’t muster up anything but a dry chuckle for it. “Looks like you’re as fucked as me now, mate.”

“What are you—”

The rear door of the lorry flew open, and there they were, late bastards but glorious all the same. Owen’s eyes burned looking at them.

“Oh my God,” Tosh said.

“Go to him,” Jack said. He was levelling a gun at Plummy, and it wasn’t his usual piece, either, but something nastier-looking with an oil-slick sheen. At the moment it seemed to suit him.

Tosh knelt down in front of Owen. Luminous Tosh, her eyes glittering with tears for him. “I’ll have you out of these in a jiffy,” she said, her voice shaking a little. “It’s nothing but undoing a lot of belts. We were so worried about you, Owen.”

Gwen was over with Jack, her attention laser-focused—“Move and I’ll shoot,” she was saying, steely calm—but Ianto had come over to Owen’s side, nimble fingers working alongside Tosh’s. He was the first one to really take in the bandages and something, Owen supposed, of the shape beneath them. His hands stilled, and he jerked sideways.

“What did you do to him?” he said sharply.

“I’m curious about the answer to that myself,” Jack said.

“You could try asking _me_ ,” Owen said.

Tosh sat back on her heels. “I thought you were drugged.”

“No, just in shock. Or whatever variation of it you can be, being dead.” The bitter taste in his mouth was an illusion, bile-like nothingness. Everything was even more ruined than it had been before. He’d already been scorched earth, and now he was salted, too. “He gave me wings.”

He said it mockingly, because how else could he say it?

Without looking over at him, Gwen said, “Don’t play games, Owen.”

“I’m not.”

Ianto loosed the last strap. “I’m just going to—” He touched Owen’s back gently, polite and professional as some kind of masseur—and there was a fantasy for you, perfect tea boy giving out happy endings. Not that he had much use for fantasies these days. Ianto’s hand was just a dull pressure.

“Unstick the adhesive a bit,” Tosh said. She’d summoned a smile for him, somehow. “See what we’re working with.”

“What did you do to René?” Plummy said finally.

“That depends,” Jack said. “Who’s René?”

“He was driving.”

“Then René’s dead.”

“There’s at least one more of them,” Owen said. “A Welsh woman. Her face is probably in that video he was playing, somewhere—I wasn’t really looking for it.”

Ianto peeled back a bit of bandage and then stepped back, his face chalky white.

“Like I said. _Wings_.” Owen spat the word out, hating it, hating that Ianto could reel back from it when he couldn’t.

“Wouldn’t have taken you for the angel type,” Jack said. His voice was light, but his expression hadn’t changed. He did something to the alien gun in his hand—cocked it, maybe, making it whir. To Plummy, he said, “Can you undo it? There’s an answer I’m looking for here and an answer I’m not. With the caveat that you _really_ shouldn’t have hurt him in the first place.”

“He can’t feel pain!” Plummy said.

“I can,” Tosh said, “looking at him.” She stood and pressed the bandage back down, closing it in a line across Owen’s skin like she was working a zipper.

“And you _took_ him,” Gwen said. “We’ve had quite enough of it, worrying about him.”

“Still waiting on an answer.” The whirring in Jack’s hand intensified. “Funny the way people stall when they’re worried you might shoot them. I’m not impatient, really, but then, I have more time than you do. You won’t outlast me.”

“That true, Ianto?” Owen said. The kind of crack that could mend them again, if Ianto didn’t hit him for it.

“Never tried,” Ianto said. “Couldn’t see the point in it.” He got close again, not apologizing, thank God, and helped boost Owen up, his hand beneath Owen’s forearm. He hadn’t gotten all his color back yet.

“It’s not reversible,” Plummy said finally, blubbing like a baby now.

“What’s put on can be taken off again,” Owen said. “Even if I have to rip it out of me. I’ll live without your _expert medical opinion_.”

Supported by Tosh and Ianto, he hobbled his way to the bright rectangle of sunlight that was the open door. He’d gone so long without moving that everything felt sluggish and number than ever. Maybe he was like a shark, now, and it was movement itself that was keeping him alive. Maybe that was why he couldn’t sleep.

“Gwen,” Jack said, “call your friend, what’s-his-name, the PC with those cute little elfin ears. We’ll get an official arrest on the books and then Retcon him. Retcon _this_ one, that is, not your friend. I’ll wait with you until that’s done. Then you can head up looking for our mystery Welsh woman, if you don’t mind.”

“But Owen—”

Jack lowered his voice and said something Owen could catch only part of. “—know a little about what it’s like—”

But he didn’t need Jack’s _empathy_ , dammit. He needed to strip these things off him. He needed a scalpel, a butcher’s knife—hell, _pinking shears_. Anything with an edge.

“What’s it like back there?” he said to Ianto. “Besides something that made you want to sick up your breakfast.”

“You’ve got a knobby spine at the best of times,” Ianto said, straight-faced. “I can’t say it’s ever been a pleasant view, really.”

“I never minded it,” Tosh said. A bit wistful.

 _Oh, love, you could do so much better than pining over a dead man. You and your taste—an alien, a frozen soldier, and a catastrophic fuck-up turned zombie._ He’d been oblivious to her, somehow, gorgeous as she was, and now that he wasn’t, he wasn’t fit to be with. There was luck for you.

He said again, “What’s it like?”

Ianto’s lips parted and then closed again and then he said, “A bit like baklava, really.”

“Like baklava,” Owen said.

“Well, thin and folded over, you see—”

“No, I don’t.” There was a ringing in his ears. “They _cut me open_ , right down to the bone, they stitched and burned something alien into my body, so I don’t see, not when you’re talking about _pudding._ ”

Tosh’s eyes were bright and wet again. “Owen—”

“I’m not anything now! How am I even going to leave the Hub if these don’t come off? You might as well lock me up in the Vault with all the other—”

She wrapped her arms around him, her hands going up high, fingers lacing behind his neck.

“Am I hurting you? I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t know if they’re—tender—”

A nice, soft, warm bundle of Tosh pressed up against him, and she was worried about his wings. Sweet fuck, the lives they led.

“I don’t feel much anymore, remember?” he said, quieter now. It was only half-true, cockeyed, cocked-up truth: he couldn’t feel much of _her_ , though it meant something to know she was there, even though all she was was pressure and temperature, not—not all the intoxicating things human touch was, not silky skin-on-skin, not proper _heat_. He couldn’t feel much of her, but, almost unsurprisingly, it really was hell on the wings. She wasn’t even touching them, either, just near them, but the way she was squeezing him still made them ache like a sore tooth.

He’d even missed pain, a little, these last few weeks. But not this much.

To his surprise, Ianto touched the small of his back, like they were going dancing—and like he thought there was half a chance in hell of Owen letting him lead if they did.

Below the wings seemed a little less sensitive than above them, or maybe Ianto’s touch was just lighter, since Ianto was nothing like as insistent as Toshiko.

“I didn’t mean anything,” Ianto said softly. “It really is just what it looks like.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “The next time something awful happens to me, you’re welcome to compare it to a whole sweet shop, if you like.”

Owen sighed. “Just take me home. Back to the Hub, I mean.” He hadn’t spent much time in his flat lately.

It felt like a long drive. Sitting back hurt, and it hurt in such a way as to make the toothache pain from before seem like a fond memory. The crumpled wings— _baklava_ —felt like they’d tear to pieces inside their dressings without him even having to do anything about it. He leaned forward the whole way, keeping his back off the seat, only half-listening as Ianto and Tosh traded back and forth the explanation of how they’d found him.

It wasn’t until they were parked and ready to get out of the car that Owen said abruptly, “It’s bumpy, isn’t it? With them all bound up like that. I must look like fucking Quasimodo.”

“It’s … not smooth,” Tosh said. “But you see stranger things on the street.”

“Maybe in London. Not in bleeding Cardiff.”

“Especially in Cardiff,” Ianto said mildly. “Our last Weevil almost got so far as ordering a latte. No one pays any attention—too afraid what they might notice.” He opened his door and stepped out. “But this will do you,” he added. He passed his jacket back inside. “Just sling it over your shoulders.”

It was charcoal, and it smelled just the barest bit more of Ianto than it did of the dry cleaner’s.

“Thanks.” He was holding it too tightly. Idiotic.

He draped it over himself as left the car. The fabric bumped and rubbed against the wings, even _that_ little bit of contact, even through the bandages, feeling raw, and he must have looked like Ianto’s date, but it was better than the other way.

Funny seeing Ianto in just his shirtsleeves. That didn’t happen all that often.

The three of them took the lift down. Myfanwy circled lazily about, not yet realizing Owen had just become her blood relation.

“Take the bandages off,” he said once they were safe.

Ianto said, “I don’t think that’s a good—"

“I happen to be the only doctor here, and it’s a medical problem, so you can do as you’re told.”

Ianto just pressed his lips together, but Tosh looked at him steadily and said, “All right, then. Where are your surgical scissors?”

“Top left drawer down by the autopsy table.”

She vanished down the stairwell.

Ianto kept his voice low as he said, “It hurts more than you were saying. I could tell by the look on your face. We have painkillers—”

“They won’t work on me anymore. Just sit there in the blood. They didn’t use them during the surgery either.” He regretted it the second he said it, because he hated the look on Ianto’s face, that horror and pity.

“I’m sorry, Owen.”

“Yeah, well. It didn’t hurt then even if it does now, so …” He shrugged, and pain lanced through him, making him gasp. So much for nonchalance.

Ianto’s hand was on his, holding him tight, so tight that Ianto’s fingers were almost as bloodlessly white as his own.

Owen hadn’t liked them touching him, not since he’d died. He knew how he must feel, how unmistakably cold and dead, but the last forty-eight hours had made mincemeat of all his reservations. He just wanted something, somebody. Even this little bit.

Tosh came back. She took in the sight of Ianto’s hand still locked around Owen’s and nodded. “Good. You do that while I cut.”

She was a genius, Tosh. Her specialties weren’t remotely organic, she was all about the digital, the mechanical, but she did this with a neatness any doctor or nurse would envy.

He hadn’t realized how much it had hurt to have the wings bound back until they were loose. There was a flame-like flicker of ease as Tosh snipped the last of the bandages and freed them.

Owen rolled his shoulders again, biting hard against his lower lip to try not to make some idiotic noise at the pain. The wings shifted with him, but they still didn’t do anything more than hang there limply. Not that he wanted them to, but he was curious, he wanted to know if—there. There was a distant, surreal twitch behind him.

This was like some reverse phantom pain. He’d gotten new limbs, but his body was so sure they weren’t there that he could barely register them as something he could control. But he _could_ —their device must have done that, because human medicine was nowhere near this kind of thing. They’d hotwired his nervous system, his _dead_ nervous system, and linked it up to an alien one that was somehow still chugging along apart from a living host, like it was running on batteries or something.

_Concentrate. Feel the boundaries of it._

His wings spasmed out straight, the sudden jerk hard enough and total enough that one of them tore a little, right by one of the spindliest bones. And he could feel that, feel the rip in the thin alien tissue. It hurt like one long papercut soaked in lemon juice.

“I want a mirror,” he said. “Or a picture. One of you take a picture of me.”

He thought they’d refuse, but they didn’t. Ianto took out his phone and aimed it, snapping the photo quickly before he passed his phone to Owen.

So there they were.

“Baklava,” he said.

“Not so much now,” Ianto said. “Now they’re—”

“Beautiful.” It was like the word slipped out of Tosh without her realizing it, and then she flushed. “I’m sorry, I know you want them gone, and I don’t blame you, obviously, it’s just that they’re … lovely.”

He could almost see that. The framework of them was dark, ink-dark against parchment-colored tissue. They were wider than he’d thought, and each one had a delicate tracery of veins that looked nearly white. Lovely, yeah, if you wanted to be part of a church window.

But they felt so vulnerable, hung up there in the back of him. He’d torn them just by moving too much too soon. He didn’t know that he’d trust them to hold his weight on any kind of flight, so they were useless as well as weak and sore.

“I still want them out of me.” But he was thinking about the video now, about that liquid-looking violet light and how it had seemed to crack deeper into his bones. Prying these off him would be an exercise in agony, and in the end, he’d still be left with two great bloody holes in his back, at best.

What he was looking at now could be a picture of the rest of his unlife. Living just in the Hub and the shadows, never going out anywhere unless he was willing to take the pain of the binding them back only to still get gawked at even then.

Ianto was looking at the wings, the expression on his face unreadable. He gestured towards them, lifting his hand up like he needed Owen to see he was unarmed. “May I? I’ll do it softly.”

It felt as grotesque as one of them asking to slip their hand into his chest cavity and poke around his unbeating heart. He nodded anyway. They were Torchwood. They always touched what they weren’t supposed to.

Ianto laid a hand on them—him—gently, as promised. At first Owen wasn’t even sure he’d made contact.

Then he felt it. Fluttery and ticklish, just the barest tips of Ianto’s fingers, and then spreading warmth, with the sharp outline of Ianto’s hand blurring into something wider and softer-edged. Ianto moved with agonizing slowness, drawing his hand along the span of the wing, from the still-crumpled tip to the raw and burning place where it merged into Owen’s body.

It drew a sharp moan out of Owen’s throat and Ianto yanked his hand back.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t,” Owen managed to say. It wasn’t entirely true, but hell, it was true enough. “That wasn’t what—”

He grabbed Ianto’s shoulder, ignoring how the movement made it feel like a red-hot bar was being shoved through him. He didn’t know that he’d ever heal there. The surgical wounds could stay raw, the old dead nerves woken up by the new ones just to send out endless red alerts; the wings could stay as delicate and easily damaged as a sheet of Ianto’s bloody baklava phyllo. He didn’t care now. Not if he had this.

He said, “I could _feel_ you. There. I can feel there. Pain, yeah, but also just _more_. They’re alive, Ianto, Tosh. They’re part of me, and they’re still alive.”

Tosh’s eyes widened. “Full sensation?”

“And then some.” Which was to say it had felt like he was half a second away from getting off, especially when Ianto’d gotten down to the part where wing met human skin. It had hurt the most there too—wasn’t that just the way the world worked—but it had also been so _real_. Human on human.

“I wondered,” Ianto murmured. “Lisa was down to mostly dead zones right before the end, but she could feel just there, where the metal started and the flesh stopped. And if these could hurt, I thought they might do more than that, treated nicely.”

Tosh said, “Can I try, Owen?”

“Yeah, of course. Please.” He was begging, really, not giving her permission.

Her hands had different calluses than Ianto’s. He could feel them that finely. She ran a little hotter, too. He’d never noticed that back when he’d been alive.

This could be something. Something other than a horror.

“What do they feel like?”

“Warm,” Tosh said. “And strange, like—brittle silk, maybe. I keep being afraid I’ll break them.”

“You won’t. You’re careful.” _Just don’t stop. It’s like being able to breathe again, taste clean air; it’s like every pint and fuck I haven’t had, not since I died._

But she did stop, dammit, because Jack arrived. He stepped off the lift platform and took the sights in as thoroughly as if they really did the tourist work they promised upstairs.

Then he whistled. “Zerellan, I think. Thirtieth century bio-medical prostheses, grown on a gel farm still in the experimental stage. Those have come a long way. Would it be wrong to say that they look kind of hot?”

If they were artificial, maybe they’d washed up on their own, especially since Plummy had had the right flesh-mending tool to go with them. He liked that better than thinking they’d been cut out of some hapless bugger spat out by the Rift.

“Not wrong,” Tosh said. “Maybe a little inappropriate.”

“So long as I don’t give any of you the vapors.” He strode over and grabbed Owen in the kind of embrace that swerved around the wings: one hand in his hair and the other on his hip. Their foreheads touched briefly and then Jack kissed him right on his hairline.

More vague pressure, but like Tosh’s earlier hug, it meant something still. And it meant even more now that he could cross it over with the sensations he could still have.

“I don’t like it when any of you get kidnapped,” Jack said. “I don’t think we should do that anymore.”

“Owen’s wings have full sensation,” Ianto said. “They’re alive.”

“You’re sure?” Jack said. He directed the question at Owen. “They’ll stay that way?”

He had only a hazy recollection of Plummy’s long explanation, but he thought that was the gist of it. “Think so.” He lifted his chin, looking Jack in the eye. “I’m keeping them. I don’t care what it looks like.”

“There are workarounds,” Tosh said. “Low grade perception filters and—”

“Specially tailored shirts,” Ianto said.

“I wouldn’t ask you to get rid of them.” Jack let his fingers hover over one wing until Owen nodded, and then he grazed it. The look on his face was like he was touching something precious. “Not at that kind of cost. Besides, they suit you.” He smiled, his teeth flashing bright. “Kind of bring out your eyes.”

* * *

He decided to stay at the Hub that night. He just couldn’t face the idea of mashing the wings flat again, of converting that tenuous off-and-on pleasure back to nothing but pain. Besides, walking around the deserted Hub with the wings stretched out gave him a chance to learn how to use them. Jack had said he’d remembered that they were capable of some finer motor skills, and Owen could almost feel that, but right now it was like trying to type by smashing his wrists against a keyboard. He could jerk them in and out, but that was all. Then the left one brushed against the overheated metal shade of one of the desk lamps and he had to drop to his knees, half-sobbing with pain as the burned wing crumpled there, the spot turning ashy and black.

“Come on,” he said, panting, reaching out to the spot without daring to touch it. “It was just a too-hot lamp, don’t do this to me. I can’t lose you in inches. You can’t break this easily.”

He had to get a hold of himself. It was just that he’d had nothing, and now he couldn’t stand the idea of going back to that, to that shapeless, lukewarm unlife. But throwing a moody wouldn’t get him anywhere.

Jack had also thought the wings, though notoriously fragile, were supposed to be proofed against infections, but those might have just been infections native to fucking Zerellan, wherever that was. Owen couldn’t take the chance. He got out the ointment they used for burns and started wrestling with the wing again, trying to get it to bend his way so he could put the salve on. When it was just him, these didn’t feel like part of his body. They were like unruly dogs he was trying to tame.

“No, you bastard, come _here_ —”

“I think it might be easier if I do it,” Ianto said from behind him. He sounded amused.

Owen only narrowly kept himself from jumping. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“That would be a neat trick under the circumstances, wouldn’t it?” He slipped into Owen’s peripheral vision and held out his hand. Owen smacked the ointment into it. “They might heal, you knew. Just because they’re fragile doesn’t mean they’re not resilient in their own way.”

“I’ll feel better once I know.”

Ianto nodded. He slipped on a pair of surgical gloves to put the salve on, and even though it was more sterile that way and even though that was the fucking point, Owen still hated it. That rubbery, room temperature kind of sensation was what he got everywhere else. But Ianto was quick, at least.

“Thanks,” Owen said when he was done. He paused. “Why’d you come back?”

Ianto looked as businesslike as ever, but there were two spots of pink on his face, high up on his cheeks. “I thought you might want more.”

“More of what?”

The pink intensified. “Contact?”

“You came back to pet me,” Owen said slowly.

Ianto rolled his eyes, which was normal enough to be almost a relief. “I _came back_ because you seemed to like all that. In a way you would have liked sex, ordinarily.”

“I wasn’t tricking you and Tosh into stroking me off—”

“I’m not saying that. But I suspect there’s an intensity, at least in certain places, where the right kind of touch could be … enjoyable.”

When he’d had that happy ending massage fantasy earlier, he’d thought part of the hotness had come from the sheer unlikeliness of it. The absurdity, even. Now here was Ianto more or less offering it to him.

 _Fuck yes_ , he almost said. But it would be a pity fuck, wouldn’t it? Ianto knew he couldn’t ask Gwen, not while she was trying with all her might to play house with Rhys and when he’d almost cocked all that up for her before; he couldn’t ask Tosh, at least not yet, because he couldn’t do that to her without knowing for sure where they’d go with it. He couldn’t hurt her. Jack, now—Jack would do it.

But he wanted Ianto, especially right now. He couldn’t say he didn’t.

Ianto, who’d been the one to stroke down the still-mending skin. Who’d made love, maybe, with Lisa, even after she was half-metal and sparks and murder, and who knew what he was about.

“I’d reciprocate,” he said finally. “If you could stomach that, under the circumstances.”

“I could.” He didn’t look like he was lying.

“Necrophile.”

“Arsehole. You’re not dead. Maybe bits of you feel that way, but not others, not now. And you’ve been you this whole time.”

“And Jack’s fine with this.” He’d never been this nitpicky about a lay before, but it was just so bloody surreal that he couldn’t help it.

Ianto’s mouth quirked. “I had to talk him out of coming along, of course.”

“Wouldn’t have objected,” Owen said swiftly, because if that was what they wanted, if that was what would make this possible, that was fine.

“It’s not about that. It was me.” He was more beet-red now, and talking quickly, and how had Owen ever missed him, missed him right along with Tosh? What had been wrong with his head? “The first time, anyway, I just wanted you. Everything else—me and Jack, you and Tosh, all of it—we can work out later. Even the reciprocity, for what it’s worth. We don’t need to do that now. I could just touch you.”

An invitation to throw caution to the winds and work out all the messy bits after? To hold on tight and hope like hell you wouldn’t break any hearts? That did sound like him.

Then again, so did fucking things up. Getting it wrong.

But that part, at least, didn’t sound much like Ianto, and maybe if you put the two of them—or the three of them, or the four of them, or however you counted when one of the people involved was Jack Harkness—together they could compensate for each other a little. Muddle along.

Owen rolled his shoulders a bit, waiting to see if the sting from the wings would sober him up. It didn’t. Right, then.

“Suits me,” he said.

Ianto didn’t look like he bought the faux-casualness of this for a second, but he didn’t say anything about it. He just touched him, moving his palms slowly down the first joint of the wings, stroking them in tandem. He was following the path of the scalpel, more or less, even if he didn’t know it. Erasing that memory and replacing it with this one: the hot smooth glide of Ianto’s hands right where the alien met the human.

He’d have felt it if Ianto had flinched—he’d have understood it too—but Ianto never did.


End file.
